The Intersection of Innovation and Contemporary Living

Daily Archives: October 22, 2007

“I’m quite pleased with the pace of new operating systems every 12 to 18 months for the foreseeable future,” he said. “We’ve put out major releases on the average of one a year, and it’s given us the ability to polish and polish and improve and improve.”

Donchawish Microsoft could roll out a new operating system rev every 18 months that includes richer application functionality and optimized usability? When I switched one of the ah-hah moments was when I realized that the applications that Apple includes with the operating system are actually highly functional.

I didn’t need Outlook anymore and because the Apple apps allow for integration with other third party apps I could more fully take advantage of them. Now I have to use Entourage (Mac version of Outlook) because NewsGator is an Exchange shop and I’m pissed off all the time as a result.

I am in calendar hell right now as that @#$#$%&%$^* application doesn’t respond to meeting requests and it’s database gets corrupted if I attempt to use the sync service to ical. Really, not only is Entourage bloated and slow, but it’s walled off from all the other apps on my desktop and I hate it. But heh, Office 2008 is supposed to be here in 2008, maybe, and 2 years after Apple moved to Intel chips and everyone else has recompiled their apps as universal binaries, Microsoft is still a holdout… is that not beyond amazingly ironic, Microsoft doesn’t natively support Intel processors on the Mac platform?

Microsoft would do well to rethink some of the basic assumptions about what should be included in an operating system.

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This looks like a good event, John Musser from ProgrammableWeb and Chad Dickerson from Yahoo! will be keynoting. What a good pairing. Check out the MashupCamp site for more details and registration information.

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Anxious to avoid upsetting air travelers, NASA is withholding results from an unprecedented national survey of pilots that found safety problems like near collisions and runway interference occur far more frequently than the government previously recognized.

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Join the Friends of NewsGator group on Facebook. No free knives, no can opener, no toaster, just the sweet smell of free flowing information about award winning products and services! You can also add our NewsFriends application; we continue to evolve this application at a fast rate as we learn more about what works and what does not in Facebook apps.

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Okay, so I missed last week (just completely forgot about it) so tonight I’m posting something special as my penance. If you ran a poll about the one book from the last 20 years that was most influential in the software business surely Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm would be in the top 3, if not the most influential. I was cleaning out some boxes full of old stuff and I found a pristine first edition of Moore’s classic.

I was tempted to keep this one but I’m at a point in my life where I’m trying to clean out some of the cob webs to make room for new knowledge so I’ll happily part with this to the THIRD person who comments. By third person who comments, that means third unique person, I can look at IP addresses submitting the comment but let’s just go with the honor system. As usual, no international shipments.

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Crispynews is a great “create your own Digg” service that I tried to use for the Irregulars a while back. I gave it up because I just didn’t get enough traffic to make it work like I wanted (you need *a lot* of visitors and contributors to make these things work) but I still love the concept.

The guys behind CrispyNews created a sister service called CrispyIdeas. The concept was to leverage the wisdom of crowds concept for new product ideas and enhancement requests that software companies sort through while developing their product roadmaps.

Salesforce.com was the most prominent customer for CrispyIdeas, the service powered IdeaExchange. Not to be overlooked is the Dell IdeaStorm site, which generated more traffic than the Salesforce service even if being less well known.

It appears that Salesforce quietly acquired CrispyNews and has rebranded their offering as Salesforce.com Ideas. All of the crispynews.com urls now point to Salesforce…

UPDATE: okay, just got backchannel confirmation that they did get acquired, no additional details to report.